


On the Road

by islasands



Series: Lambski [36]
Category: Adam Lambert (Musician)
Genre: M/M, The heart as a desert
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2012-03-07
Updated: 2012-03-07
Packaged: 2017-11-01 14:40:45
Rating: Not Rated
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 887
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/357977
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/islasands/pseuds/islasands
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Adam is on the road. It is the end of a long day...</p><p>The song, "Calling You" was written by Bob Telson. You might like to listen as you read.</p>
            </blockquote>





	On the Road

"CALLING YOU"

  


Jeff Buckley

  


 

The day was done.

Adam lay on his hotel bed and put his arms behind his head. He closed his eyes and quickly opened them again. As soon as his eyes had closed he had seen, in his mind’s eye, two escalators on either side of him, one going up, and one going down, and faces were staring at him as they ascended or descended. Random faces. The faces of strangers.

He decided to brush his teeth. He went to the bathroom and in the mirror above the basin watched himself watching himself performing the task. He splashed his face with cold water then buried his face in a towel, burying it for longer than was necessary. He switched off all the lights. An outdoor light, suffused by the opaque fabric of the curtains, bathed the bedroom in an orange glow. He slept.

_It was evening and he was walking down a dusty road in the middle of nowhere. The sky was orange and blue. The ground was bitumen grey. The bus that had dropped him off went past him. On his left there were steep hills of detritus, topped by crags that clearly had lost interest in maintaining a grip on their heights. To his right, behind a scattering of abandoned buildings, a plain of stones stretched out to the horizon. A blue car was parked in front of one the empty shops with the driver's door left open. This was a no man’s land, a no living thing’s land. It was invigorating. He swung his arms for no other reason than there was nothing stopping him from doing it. He unbuttoned and untucked his shirt. There was a warm wind that smelled of rocks and dirt and petrol fumes. He decided to take off his shirt and jacket so that it could play on his bare chest._

_This is my world, he thought. Nothing much to see here. Nothing special. A lot of left over fuckedupness. Mountains you couldn’t climb because they’re over themselves. A road going nowhere in a good, straight line. A dirty wind. God I love it. That sky, too big and empty and cloudless to be beautiful. No promise of rain. No pretty lakes or trees. No magnificent ocean. No snow capped mountains. I’m free and own nothing but the length of my strides._

_He carried on walking until he came to a bus shelter, set in front of a disused railway building. He realised a railway ran along the base of the hills. He climbed up the embankment and looked down at the tracks. Trains are good, he thought. I like trains. I was on a train once, when I was a teenager, and it was night time, and the reflection of my face in the window was of the face of a stranger. I liked that. I wondered what the stranger of me, with his lonely eyes, was thinking. He bent down and picked up a handful of the jagged stones. On the second to last throw he managed to hit the track and it rang out. I was never a very good shot, he thought, wiping his hands on the sides of his pants. He went back to the bus shelter and lay down on the seat. A nap in the wasteland of his heart would be good. He put his shirt back on and folded his jacket up to make a pillow. A tanker went by and the seat shook. He ran his fingers over a name someone had scratched into the seat. The smell of the hillside scree and roadside dust made him think of the colour of rust. Rust is good, he thought. I like rust. The red of things that are beyond fixing._

_He was woken by the dark and the cold and by the sound of a train. It was stopping. He got up and walked up to the little platform behind the station building. The train was lit up and he could see that it was empty. But then a door opened and someone got out and came walking towards him._

_“Hey you,” said his voice._

_The train pulled away. They stood on the platform, in the middle of their nowhere, and embraced._

_They broke into the old railway building and slept on the floor. On one of the walls there was an old railway clock. Its glass face was broken and the small hand, the hand that tells the hours, was missing. Grey webs, soft with disuse, hung from the corners in the ceiling. A sweep of his arm cleared the dust from the wooden floor and revealed its old shine. This was their bed. He pulled his love closer in case he was cold. He felt a twang of pity for the rest of world, which he knew was out there somewhere, groaning in its chains. “Imagine never knowing this,” he thought._

_But he fell asleep regardless. “At the end of the day,” he thought, as he felt himself floating off, “all I can do is forgive myself,” – he pulled his lover’s jacket collar up and pulled him closer in his arms, -“for being the happiest, most fulfilled man in the world.”_

The hotel phone rang. He woke up and answered it. They talked for ages. 


End file.
